This will help someone who is not familiar with the Oracle. The asnwer was very simple. I changed the column names to capital letters and this problem resolved. This must be an oracle thing.
tryCatch({
ch=odbcConnect("<id>",pwd = "<passwd>")
sql<-c("SELECT * FROM KEYNOTE_PRD WHERE KEYNOTE_PRD.SITE='High Frequency NY Traffic'")
res<-sqlQuery(ch, sql)
},error = function(e) {
print(odbcGetErrMsg(ch))
print("retrive or connect to the db")
})
odbcClose(ch)